MEPIS, one of the more popular Debian-derived distributions, may be moving in a new direction soon. MEPIS founder Warren Woodford is considering building future MEPIS releases from Ubuntu sources rather than from Debian. SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3, which is scheduled for release today, has been quite a challenge to build, according to Woodford. "It's taking up all my time, fighting the Etch pool... We've had a lot of trouble, because the Debian community has become so active, it's been difficult to get this out, so I'm looking at alternatives to getting out stable releases."

Dearie me...comprehension is exceptionally bad today. Read my reply to the other poster. Saves me having to repeat it.

1. Not a monopoly - yet.

2. Debian does not have broken release policies. Slow, yes. But not broken. Please choose your words more carefully. Debian's main issue is that it supports so many arches. imho - too many arches. In reality, only PPC, i386, amd64 and sparc should be supported, the rest should die like the dinosaurs that they are.

Please note that Debian doesn't have millions of dollars donated to it. It does what it does on a much smaller budget than Ubuntu. Money does help. Maybe Mark should have donated a few million to Debian eh?

You most certainly did imply that Ubuntu is a monopoly. You further asserted that this will eventually "kill of Debian". I'd suggest you pay more attention to what you write if you wish to be understood more precisely.

I choose to call Debian's release policies "broken" because that is what I believe them to be. They need to to be fixed. Luckily most of the Debian maintainers realize this and efforts to this are underway. FWIW, I agree with you that Debian needs to reasses its support of obscure platforms. My recommendation would be make only PPC and the x86 family release critical, all other architectures would remain supported so long as there are maintainers interested in doing the work, but problems getting X to build on Spark would no longer be able to hold up the release schedule.

Quote: This is exactly why I said Ubuntu was a bad bad thing. Ubuntu will eventually kill off Debian, and any Debian based competitors. Monopolies are always bad for business, whether they're Linux based or not.

Dave"

Read my f--king post again dimwit. Jesus. Are you guys that f--king thick that you can't f--king read and comprehend basic English?

As to broken, I don't consider Debian broken, slow, yes, but not broken.